Thank you, Chair. We thank you for this opportunity to discuss our chapter on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's efforts to manage risks to Canada's plant resources. Joining me today at the table are the Assistant Auditor General, Neil Maxwell, and principal Dale Shier, who are responsible for this audit.
This is an audit of CFIA's efforts to keep invasive alien plants, seeds, plant pests, and plant diseases out of Canada. The agency's efforts are important for two key reasons. The first is to protect Canada's economy. In 2005, the value of Canada's forest and agricultural commodities was about $100 billion. The second and equally important reason is to protect Canada's environment. According to experts, invasive species are the second most serious threat to biodiversity after habitat loss.
Invasive species can cause costly plant health emergencies, such as the emerald ash borer, an insect that is killing ash trees in Ontario and Quebec, and the golden potato nematode, which is present in Quebec and Alberta and can reduce potato yields. However, even though plant health emergencies are important in our report, they were not audited. Our report focused on measures taken by the agency to prevent the introduction of invasive species into Canada. Most people agree that it costs less to fight invasive plants, plant pests and plant diseases before they become established.
The agency takes measures to prevent invasive species from entering Canada depending on the degree of risk because there are far too many imports to inspect them all. We looked into whether the agency was managing risk appropriately when it came to invasive exotic plants, their seeds, plant pests and plant diseases that could enter the country and become established.
Our audit identified a number of serious issues. We therefore looked to some of the underlying causes of the problems, and we have identified four key issues.
First, there is a lack of appropriate coordination among branches. For example, the policy branch sets inspection standards, but field staff and the operations branch do not always have the current version of the standards.
Second, the plant health program does not have adequate quality management systems. We looked at CFIA's efforts to inspect shipments of plants and plant products. We looked at a small sample of plant shipments, in February 2008, for which the agency's desk review had determined that 100% of the shipment required inspection. Of the 27 shipments we examined, we found that only about 40% of the required inspections had actually taken place. For the others, some shipments were simply released without inspection. In other cases, the office that was supposed to do the inspection had no record of receiving the related import documents.
Third, there is a lack of information management and information technology support. For example, many of the import approval and inspection activities are still paper based, and the agency needs to send thousands of faxes between its offices annually, which perhaps contributes to the missing documents we observed in our testing.
Fourth, import volumes are increasing. In fact, the volume of regulated plant imports more than doubled between 2000-01 and 2007-08.
Overall, we concluded that the agency does not have an effective, integrated, risk-based plant and imported plant product management strategy. We issued a number of recommendations to correct the shortfalls we observed. The agency accepted our recommendations and made a number of commitments in its response. The committee may want to study progress achieved up to this point and ask the agency if it has developed action plans and timelines to address the problems raised in the audit.
Mr. Chair, that concludes my opening statement. My colleagues and I will be happy to answer committee members' questions.
Thank you.